Two weeks later, the blaring courant.com online question is still there: "$3.4 Million for Fired UConn Coach. So Who Pays?"

One of the most satisfying things about covering sports for a living is the finite nature of the scoreboard. Yes, the scoreboard. There is a winner. There is a loser. There is a final result. Rarely do headlines end in a question mark.

The firing of UConn football coach Bob Diaco and the subsequent hiring of Randy Edsall and his staff has brought a spate of editorial commentary, reader reaction and Twitter proclamations that point to the fact that sports is not always a microcosm of society.

Sports has a scoreboard. Society has a moving target.

I know that getting the best answer to the question about the $3.4 million buyout — deemed important two weeks ago — probably will only lead to four movable responses from those inside and outside the state sports scene:

1. Who cares? Just win, Randy. 2. How do you know UConn is telling the truth? 3. Even if UConn is being truthful, football is an outrageous waste of money and an abomination of the primary collegiate responsibility to educate. 4. Get basketball back into the Big East.

Here we go anyway.

No student fees are going into Diaco's buyout. That's according to UConn Chief Financial Officer Scott Jordan. He's the money guy. He should know.

Let's backtrack for clarification. The state furnishes 28 percent of the revenue funding the $1.3 billion UConn budget. The school's athletic budget is more than $72 million.

According to the presentation package by UConn to the Big 12 when the conference was considering expansion, the university athletic subsidy has grown from $4.49 million to $21.54 million between 2012 and 2016. The budget for 2017 calls for the subsidy to reach $25.4 million.

According to a USA Today survey, student fees furnished more than $10 million and the university contributed $18 million toward the athletic budget in 2014-2015.

"The athletic budget is funded from many sources, ticket sales, media rights, licensing fees, etc.," Jordan said. "There is some amount of student fee that goes into the fund, too. That is a direct fee that, honestly, the students pay a low subsidized rate for student tickets, pep bands and that stuff."

Annual student fees at UConn have been at $2,842.

"We do not ever use tuition dollars or state appropriation dollars to subsidize athletics," Jordan said. "We keep a wall between them. Also, with the UConn Foundation, a lot of donors give money through our 501c3 [tax-exempt nonprofit organization] to support athletics."

People familiar with UConn athletics already know this. We include Jordan's explanation for those who don't follow UConn athletics.

As Matthew Kauffman of The Courant wrote in his piece of Dec. 28, however, critics see the school's and athletic department's budgets as homogenous taxpayer-supported piles of money.

"Within our accounting for athletic expenditures, we can spend specific sources for specific things," Jordan said. "We are careful to use those sources that athletics generate to pay for the buyout. In this case, it would be ticket sales, media rights and licensing fees."

So no student fees go toward the buyout of Bob Diaco's contract?

"That's right," Jordan said.

Are there dynamics in place to ensure this?

"There is an accounting system, and when a person is paid at the university, the source of funds has to be identified," Jordan said. "There are university employees, who we can look through our computer, though our payroll system, and identify, 'That employee was paid out of the money the state gave us.' Or, 'That employee was paid out of the general revenues of the university that might include tuition.'

"This particular case is a payroll issue [Diaco must be paid his buyout within 60 days of his Jan. 2 termination]. We will be able to look at it and see that he was paid from self-generated athletic revenues."

Jordan said he doesn't know if anyone has, but donors also can specify to the UConn Foundation if they want to give money toward the buyout. The Foundation would set up a separate account and give it to UConn solely for that purpose. According to school spokespeople, no donor has picked up a big piece of the Diaco tab.

Without huge Power Five conference TV revenue, UConn athletics faces a long-term predicament when the Big East buyout money expires in 2018. Some hard decisions will have to be made. Yet for today, your kid's tuition money and, more specifically, student fees aren't paying for any of the $3.4 million going to Diaco.

"Oh good grief..." Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton tweeted, linking to a news story about the $3.4 million...

Satisfied? Refer to Paragraph 6 for one of your responses. Move the target any way you want. I tried to give you the best scoreboard answer.

Let's also try to give a little perspective on Diaco's buyout clause. According to USA Today, Florida State's Jimbo Fisher has a $33.1 million buyout. Ohio State's Urban Meyer and Michigan's Jim Harbaugh have buyouts of $27.4 million and $25.5 million. Kirk Ferentz has a $25.3 million buyout at Iowa. Lovie Smith got a $19.3 million buyout at Illinois. When Bronco Mendenhall left BYU for Virginia last year, he got a $14.3 million buyout clause. He also lost to three-win UConn in 2016.

Are those numbers nuts? Of course, they are. Five years ago, according to USA Today, 15 coaches had buyouts of more than $8 million. By last season, it had swelled to 33. So it's wrong to paint UConn as a special kind of stupid for giving Diaco a $5 million buyout through Dec. 31, 2016 and $3.4 million starting Jan. 2.

With a state budget crisis, with layoffs, it certainly doesn't make it right, but this is the price of security that agents have been able to extricate for their coaching client. Ultra-competitive Power Five schools, loaded with television football money, pay it.

Yes, it sucks for UConn that the buyout would only have been $800,000 under his original deal and that changed last spring with his extension. After the bowl appearance in 2015, the problem is nobody expected Diaco to fail so spectacularly so quickly. The bigger problem, in case anybody forgot, UConn is not in the Power Five.

In the face of some outrage over Edsall hiring his son Corey as a tight ends coach at a salary of $95,000, some similar perspective is needed. In a stinging Courant op-ed piece Kevin Rennie, a former state legislator, wrote that it was an "extraordinary leap into nepotism. It soils the integrity of the UConn administration and reminds us that the board of trustees is spineless."

From Steve Spurrier, to Joe Paterno, to Frank Beamer, college coaches have been hiring their sons as assistants for decades at state schools. The scoreboard shows that in 2009, according to USA Today, 11 percent of major college football coaches had relatives on their staffs.

"Why is UConn saddling its athletics program with someone, Corey Edsall, who doesn't have to go through normal hiring channels?" Rennie wrote. "It is clear by the nature of the deal that there will be no merit-based competition for the position, whatever it turns out to be."

I asked athletic director David Benedict to explain his side of it, and he gave me a no comment and that Rennie has the right to his opinion. Benedict also has the right to comment, and sometimes I think UConn can be tone deaf to the outside world.

UConn posted openings for offensive and defensive coordinators and for other assistant coaches. Corey got one of those jobs. In Edsall's contract, it was stipulated he will not directly supervise his son. Corey will report to Chief Operating Officer Beth Goetz.

I can only surmise no rules were broken. Look, college coaches everywhere have long been allowed to pick their staffs. Football coaches place a premium on loyalty. Merit-based competition? Good grief, they almost always hire assistants they know well and trust implicitly. Many are longtime friends. The "nepotism" extends beyond blood. It doesn't make it right, but it makes UConn and Edsall nothing different in this case.

But it's your target, sports fans and non-sports people. Move it any way you see fit.